Constitution of Medina

The Constitution of Medina is a document traditionally dated to 622 or 623 CE, shortly after Muhammad's arrival in Medina (then Yathrib), setting out the terms on which the city's Muslim emigrants, Muslim converts native to Medina, and several Jewish tribes would form a single political community, the umma. As a legal and political instrument it is widely cited by historians and legal scholars as among the earliest surviving written constitutions, establishing rules for collective defense against outside attack, a shared mutual-responsibility system for blood money and ransom, a procedure for referring disputes to Muhammad as arbiter, and, notably, an explicit guarantee that the named Jewish tribes would practice their own religion and manage their own affairs while joining the alliance's common defense. This entry treats the document as a governance and legal-history instrument, one of the earliest attempts anywhere to bind multiple kinship and faith groups into one polity by written agreement rather than conquest or descent; its religious and revelatory significance within Islamic tradition is the proper subject of the Divinity Atlas's own entry on the same document, and the two entries describe different facets of one historical text rather than duplicating each other.